Sitaka
Sitaka is a wandering Tuffle engineer with a large mechanical suit that she refers to as the A.P.E. Appearance Outside of A.P.E. mkIV, Sitaka is barely shoulder-height to an adult human, making her look more like she's in her early teens or even younger, but is otherwise indistinguishable from human. Her skin is pale from time spent outside of the sunlight, she has chin-length dirty blonde hair which is usually held back by an oil-stained scarf tied around her forehead, and her eyes are a metallic gray. She is much less muscular than her peers, having swapped physical training for honing her skills at tactics and engineering, but is still well-built by Tuffle standards. She dresses in the usual Tuffle clothing - hooded tunic over a long-sleeved shirt, fingerless gloves, trousers, and boots. She also wears a toolbelt and an orange scouter. The A.P.E. mkIV itself is much larger, twice as big as its Tuffle pilot, with an egg-like body and thick limbs. It has no visible head, but instead keeps its pilot's face visible near the top of the “egg” using a pane of translucent material just as durable as the rest of the metal. This pane doubles as a monitor, on which Sitaka can pull up information like her enemy's power level. Painted onto the suit’s exterior is its namesake, a ferocious painting of a Saiyan’s fearsome Great Ape form, complete with blood-red eyes and razor-sharp fangs. Personality Sitaka is usually the most lighthearted of her allies, with a carefree and laidback nature that stems from never having to overexert her physical body in the field. She is talkative to a fault, and tends to better at interactions with machines than with people. Her role in combat has spawned an almost playful attitude towards her enemies, and she will often taunt them early on if the battle is too easy. She enjoys cooking out of a love of good food, but most of the time she's the only one that will end up eating what she makes simply because she's nearly always alone when she's cooking. She also has an interest in the properties and scientific applications of ki as a power source, and has an unusual love of using her spare ki canisters to experiment with firing ki blasts at miscellaneous objects, under the guise of “A.P.E.-based researching,” to see which one looks coolest when it explodes. She’s also a huge geek when it comes to sci-fi and anime, tends not to trust felines of any sort, and dislikes celery because of how stringy it is. Abilities Without the assistance of technology, Sitaka has a total power level of seven. She can only barely tap into her ki, cannot sense energy, and though capable of flight she cannot maintain high speeds. She overcomes this weakness through a power suit called the Adamantine max-Potential Exoskeleton mark Four, or A.P.E. mkIV for short. This full-body suit of armor can exert and withstand incredible amounts of force, and is equipped with an arsenal of weapons, including half a dozen guided missiles and laser cutters at the tips of its fingers. It is equipped with a variety of sensory filters, including the same power-sensing technology as scouters. Its armor is designed to withstand fast flurries of punches, which leaves it slightly more vulnerable to the standalone but more powerful swings that it can counter more easily. Most prominently, however, is its ability to tap into canisters of ki, which is passively gathered from sunlight, the environment, and even dead lifeforms when absolutely necessary, in order to perform large-scale ki-based feats that Sitaka cannot normally perform. These feats include beam attacks (most prominently Sitaka’s signature move, the Radiate Cannon, which combines ki energy with a powerful radiation-based laser to decimate opposition and carve out the landscape) and high-speed flight. As icing on the cake, these reserves of ki are concealed by the material of the canisters, and leaves Sitaka with a visible power level of eight until the ki is in use. A.P.E. mkIII’s adjustable nature means that Sitaka has the potential to advance in strength faster than any of her peers if given enough time to tinker with and improve her systems, but its size and sluggish movements make it an easy target, and Sitaka’s own physical weakness results in her needing to withdraw from the battle sooner than her allies if A.P.E. takes too much damage. If it becomes too damaged to retreat, however, Sitaka will reluctantly eject herself from within and abandon A.P.E. to escape on her own. Techniques * Flight: Sitaka is able to channel ki to fly both inside of the A.P.E. and out of it. Of course, due to its greater control of ki, the A.P.E. is capable of flying with much greater control and velocity than Sitaka can unassisted. * Ki Blasts:: A basic energy wave attack which Sitaka can use even outside of the A.P.E., albeit much less effectively. The A.P.E. is capable of forming a wide range of different Ki Blast variants, depending on what varieties of ki it has access to. * Radiate Cannon: Often considered by Sitaka to be her signature attack, which uses radiation and ki combined to carve a massive hole through both the battlefield and her enemies. It eats through ki more than nearly all of her attacks, so she uses it very sparingly; when she does, though, it's usually a good idea to get out of the way. * Sunburn Beam: Sitaka fires all of the A.P.E.'s diamond-cutting lasers at once at an enemy, sloppily shredding through armor at high speeds. This technique has a tendency to overheat and isn't as effective on flesh, limiting its usage greatly, but it does not require any ki to use. * Asteroid Fist: A powerful attack bathed in an aura of ki that drastically increases the power of the attack. Though it's named the Asteroid Fist, it can actually be used with any of the A.P.E.'s limbs. * Falling Star: Sitaka retracts all of the A.P.E.'s limbs into its body and uses gravity manipulation technology to massively amplify its weight. Sitaka most often uses this form to shield herself from harm while she plans her next move, or to crush a vulnerable enemy into dust from above. * Glorious Supernova: A last-resort maneuver of all of the A.P.E. models, which involves Sitaka releasing its escape capsule and depressurizing all of its ki canisters at the same time. The result is a massive explosion that rivals the Spirit Bomb in its devastating power; however, it almost completely destroys the A.P.E., leaving Sitaka herself relatively defenseless. So, naturally, she prefers to use it as a last-resort technique. History Creating the A.P.E. From a young age, it was obvious that Sitaka would benefit Tufflekind. Though that wasn’t saying much - Tuffles were gifted with technological genius aplenty already, and Sitaka was only marginally better than her peers. What set her apart from the rest, however, was her keen interest in the biology of her species’ neighbors, the Saiyans. She was most specifically interested in their ability to tap into a mysterious energy that they called “ki,” which allowed them to perform incredible feats of strength as mighty as lasers of power that could destroy entire planets. In Age 646, Sitaka graduated from a prestigious university at age fourteen (only two years ahead of her peers), and immediately began studying ki. She quickly discovered that ki was not exclusive to Saiyans, and that every living creature, with enough training, could tap into their ki to perform the same incredible feats. Saiyans were simply more attuned to this force, and could reach these levels more easily through their Zenkais and their Great Ape transformations. She spent a year attempting to hone her body in order to tap into her own reserves of ki. However, her progress was slow, and she only managed to raise her total power level by a mere three points. She needed a faster method through which she could experiment with ki’s potential. Her inspiration came one weekend in Age 651, shortly after she had given up on her training, during a marathon of an anime about giant mechs fighting for dominance. She realized that, if ki was a natural energy source in every living creature, she could theoretically tap into the ki of others and “borrow” it to perform feats that would be impossible of somebody with her meager strength. (Ironically, this is the same concept behind King Kai’s Spirit Bomb attack, through which the user absorbs the ki energy of their environment in order to wield an attack several times more powerful than anything they could wield on their own. She didn’t know this at the time, but if she ever DOES learn about this - like, say, if she were to die and somehow make the journey across Snake Way to King Kai’s planet - she would certainly be interested in knowing more about the Spirit Bomb and its many feats.) With this in mind, Sitaka began construction of her Adamantine max-Potential Exoskeleton, nicknamed “APE” as an abbreviation and in joking reference to how she would use this power suit to obtain a combat potential boost equivalent to that the Saiyans got from their Great Ape forms. This mech suit has gone through three iterations leading up to her present model. The mkI fell apart under the stress of containing ki in canisters. The mkII, though it was capable of containing ki safely, tended to be far more sluggish than its successor and had much less variety of attack, meaning that it was rendered useless once it depleted its ki reserves. The most recent model, the mkIII, can use ki much more efficiently, has more non-ki weaponry for dealing with enemies, and is less sluggish but also less tank-like when compared to its predecessor. Though her APE mkIII was met with mixed responses, Sitaka was convinced that it could benefit her race and allow them to match Saiyans in the field of battle... or, at least, for a little while. During her engineering of the mkII, she had heard of the Star Larks - a group of fighters from across the cosmos that were hell-bent on protecting the galaxy from its most powerful threats. Mostly by punching those threats in the face. A lot. And really hard. Though they were almost solely interested in ki-users and experienced fighters, Sitaka knew that they would need somebody with actual brains - not every race could survive in the vacuum of space like the Frost Demons could, and they’d need somebody to pilot a spacecraft - and that her APE would be a welcome bonus by allowing her to fight on the front lines alongside them. She was quickly accepted into the Sky Larks, having impressed nearly every member with her skillset, and spent the following two years traveling across the galaxy with them. Put On Ice Everything soon changed for Sitaka, though. It began in Age 653 when the Sky Larks were enlisted to challenge a tyrannical Frost Demon named Seroh the Absolute. The fight went disastrously, and all of Sitaka's friends and allies were slowly picked off by Seroh. When Sitaka was the only one left, she decided in a moment of cowardice to flee. Seroh mercilessly pursued, and eventually managed to break both the A.P.E.'s hull and a ki canister using a Death Beam. All warmth and oxygen flooded out of the cockpit while liquid ki flooded in, resulting in it freezing around Sitaka nearly instantly. Though that amount of cold would have normally instantly killed her, she was kept alive in a cryogenic sleep by the frozen ki she was entombed in. Seroh, none the wiser, left her for dead, and she was left drifting in space for over one hundred years. As a result, she survived the genocides of both the Tuffles and the Saiyans. Additionally, the overexposure to ki in such harmless quantities resulted in the rate at which Sitaka aged slowing to a crawl. Her reawakening turned out to mostly be due to coincidence. In Age 759, her frozen tomb crash-landed in one of Namek's vast isolated plains. The ki surrounding her, however, remained frozen until near the end of Age 762, when Goku began gathering energy from all the nearby planets to perform a Spirit Bomb that he believed would defeat Frieza. All of the ki that had kept Sitaka alive and asleep was drained away, and she slowly regained consciousness. Back in the Game During the time between her revival from cryogenic stasis and Namek's destruction at Frieza's hands, Sitaka frantically avoided the battle between Goku and Frieza while trying to scavenge for parts with which to rebuild the A.P.E. Though she would have failed miserably due to the tribal and somewhat primitive nature of Namekian civilizations, she was saved once again by coincidence when Porunga's third wish teleported her and everyone else on the planet to the safety of Earth. Feeling very confused after the recent events and vulnerable without her A.P.E.'s protection, Sitaka used the confusion of the Guru's death to slip away, with a long-term plan very similar to what she had in mind on Namek - lay low and rebuild the A.P.E. using scavenged parts. Had she done this, it would have taken several decades to reassemble her magnum opus. Fortunately, upon discovering Capsule Corporation, she decided instead to try a very different approach. She joined Capsule Corporation under the guise of an Earth engineer named Stirling Fry and split her time between doing jobs for the company and working on what she quickly started calling the A.P.E. mkIV. Though she completed the mkIV in a mere three months thanks to the overabundant resources at her disposal, she continued working with Capsule Corporation in hopes of repaying her debt towards the peoples of both Earth and Namek. More TBA! 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